Impediments to Hydropower development in Nepal

Posted on January 8, 2017

Photo source: Stockergy

-This article was originally published by Ashesh Shrestha on January 8, 2017 in The Himalayan Times.

Impediments to Hydropower Development in Nepal

Hydropower development has been a matter of huge discourse and discussion for years in Nepal – a country distressed by hours and hours of load shedding – now. Earlier last year (in February), the Ministry of Energy came up with an action plan on National Energy Crisis Prevention and Electricity Development Decade, 2016 (NECPEDD 2016). This 92-step strategy provides steps to increase electricity production to 10,000 MW in the next decade. However, in retrospect, the government’s plans and strategy have seldom proven to work. The 10,000 MW production had already been envisioned in 2008, almost a decade ago, and still no progress can be seen, let alone achieving the target. Seeing the dismal state of various other plans and strategies of the government in terms of achieving the desired results makes one doubt the efficacy of “this” strategy as well. A number of policy and practical aspects of hydropower sector will have to be addressed if we are serious about hydropower development.

Political and Policy problem

For the generation of high volume of electricity, a huge level of investment is required in hydro power sector. As the government cannot finance all hydro power projects, a large part of the investment has to come from private sector and foreigners. Greater degrees of foreign and domestic private investment requires stable political and sound policy environment. These factors reduces risk and enhance profitability of the investment. However, unstable political environment, frequent changes in government, inefficient and extremely politicized bureaucracy and unclear regulations in Nepal have increased the risk and uncertainty of the return on investment and thus made the investment climate in Nepal unfavorable. Once the government changes, the strategies and policies brought by the preceding government is not followed by the successor. This has hindered the development of hydropower sector in Nepal.

Furthermore, multiple government agencies involved in the whole process of hydro power development is a major problem. Under the current policy framework, seven ministries and 23 government departments are involved in the development phase; a total of 36 Acts and Regulations guide hydropower development. The involvement of various government agencies and lack of coordination among them delays the development of the project and further increases the uncertainty.

Benefit Sharing

One of the biggest problems faced by independent power producers is the problem of benefit sharing. The idea of benefit sharing is to make sure that part of the benefits that power producers derive out of their hydropower projects also accrue to the locals in some way for what they have to give up; for example, land, access to water, access to forest, environmental safety and sources of livelihood like farming and fishing.

Electricity Act (1992) requires projects larger than 1 MW to obtain license and pay royalty to the government. The Local Self Governance Act and Local Self Governance Regulations in 1999 required central government to allocate 10 percent of the royalty received to be used in districts where projects are located. This was increased to 12 percent by the amendment in 2004. However, these provisions have not worked as planned.

On the other hand, locals expect the hydropower projects to provide basic infrastructure and service like schools, hospitals, roads etc. They also seek shares in the project and have at times been accused to have floated other unreasonable demands. But, as hydropower developer seeks profit and always tries to reduce cost, they cannot fulfill all the demands of the locals. In this scenario, locals group together to halt and obstruct the hydropower project and force the developer to fulfill their demands. The obstruction of the locals delays the projects and increases the cost. There are also chances that the project would be stopped.

There is no clear answer to what the locals can demand from the developers, what the developers are supposed to give back to the locals, and what role the government is supposed to play in terms of mitigating conflicts of interests between the two former groups, should they arise (and many a times, they do). Hence, the lack of proper regulatory framework regarding benefit sharing mechanism has increased uncertainty and risk. This discourages and demotivates the investors to invest in the hydropower sector.

Availability of finance

The cost of generating 1 MW of electricity has been estimated to be about Rs. 180 million. Taking this into consideration, if we calculate the cost for 10,000 MW, it would be Rs. 1.8 trillion, which is pretty much close to our GDP of Rs. 2.3 trillion. Apart from this, hydropower projects have long gestation periods, so they need long-term financing. For commercial banks on the other hand, short-term investments with greater returns would appear to be more lucrative. Hence, financial deficit is a major problem. In order to cover the deficit, investment from the foreign investors can have a good deal of contribution. Greater degrees of foreign investment would mean that Nepal can harness more and more of its hydropower potential in the future, if not 10,000 MW in 10 years.

These are three out of many problems faced by hydropower sector of Nepal. Several studies have figured out many other problems. Underdeveloped capital market, lack of adequate transmission lines and insufficient capacity of existing and planned cross-border transmission lines for evacuation of electricity are some other major problems. As there are lot of problems to be addressed, we might not be able to solve all these problems at once. However, if we are committed to development of hydropower sector, we could resolve one issue at a time. Breaking these bottlenecks is the need of the hour for Nepal, in terms of hydropower development..